


Starting Over

by Ainikki



Category: Dororo (Anime 2019)
Genre: And now it's Tahomaru's turn, Author is a younger sibling and this story is younger sibling angst, Bonus - Jukai also lives, But the fic also ultimately reverses them so..., Gen, It's only fair, Listen I wrote a really long coda and redemption arc for Hyakki, Major character deaths are canon, Nui no Kata lives, Tahomaru lives, Tahomaru-centric, The goddess of mercy has Groundhog Day powers, just go with it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29832405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ainikki/pseuds/Ainikki
Summary: Set just before and during the finale, starting at episode 23 (Hyakkimaru and Tahoumaru's final fight). Tahoumaru is cut down, but revives earlier that day. Hyougo and Mutsu are still alive, and his father sends him a message to hunt down Hyakkimaru.What is he supposed to do next?
Relationships: Hyakkimaru & Tahomaru (Dororo), Hyogo & Mutsu & Tahomaru (Dororo), Tahomaru & Daigo
Kudos: 4





	Starting Over

**Author's Note:**

> For my older brother, who is every bit as awesome as Hyakkimaru.

Tahoumaru commands his father's army to clear out the palace as fast as possible, before Hyakkimaru arrives. Whatever happens next, he wants to minimize casualties as much as possible. 

Bamboo mats and baskets fall and are left unattended; people's faces flit past him in a blur of speed and panic. He is still not used to his new eyes; his vision is clear if he focuses on something specific, but when he stops paying attention everything living develops a strange corona like an aura. Fire has this aura, too, and he goes around the palace banking neglected fires and blowing out candles one by one, checking for stragglers as he goes.

It takes less than an hour to clear the palace, and then Tahomaru is alone. He lights the lamps in the hallway and two candles before his mother's empty prayer altar and waits.

It's dead quiet except for a strong wind that shakes all the sliding doors. He bows his head and closes all three of his eyes, thinking about what he has to do. 

Hyakkimaru had cut down Hyogo and Mutsu. Tahomaru feels his pulse race and anger build like a core of molten lava sustained by rage, but he pushes it aside for the moment. He does not need demonic strength; not yet. 

Hyakkimaru had saved Hyogo's life once. He'd killed a monster. If Daigo's reports are true, he's killed several of them.

Tahomaru shakes his head and laughs a little at himself. Even his mother had given up on Hyakkimaru. Hyakkimaru is a monster himself. He remembers how he'd wielded the sharp sword edges after regrowing his arms; hiltless, with his bare hands, mind lost in pain and rage. It's Tahomaru's duty to kill him. It would probably be a kindness.

 _If you do manage to kill him_ , the demons in his head whisper, _Kaga will be at peace again. The war will stop. Daigo will come home and your mother will recover._

They can be a family, in a way they've never been able to--because Hyakkimaru's influence has stained his parents' past.

He wants to be worthy of his parents. He wants his parents to be happy, because if they are happy, maybe he can be, too. His mother has always treated him as something tragic and precious for reasons he'd never understood until he found out about the demons. His father used to smile at him, but he hasn't done that in over a year.

"Hyakkimaru," he mutters under his breath. "Hundred demons, huh? Is that how many he's supposed to kill, or is that what he's actually supposed to be?"

He keeps his eyes closed and breathes. He hears a rush of air from somewhere and opens his eyes: Hyakkimaru is there, in front of him, crazed and covered in blood.

Tahomaru lifts his sword and levels it. "There's no need to hold back. Come get me."

Hyakkimaru leaps at him in rage, and Tahomaru deflects the first sword strike so strongly that Hyakkimaru jumps back and scrabbles his feet up the wall behind him. He jumps off the wall from above and lands squarely in front of Tahomaru with a harsh, wordless cry, and then it's chaos: strike after strike after strike gaining in speed and momentum, but they're easy to block. Hyakkimaru keeps aiming for his head.

His eyes. That's all Hyakkimaru cares about.

Tahomaru corners Hyakkimaru and pins him in one place briefly; Hyakkimaru ducks under an X-block and kicks his way out of Tahomaru's range. Hyakkimaru focuses all his energy in his legs as he stands, and the force of his next blow sends Tahomaru staggering backwards and falling straight down.

Tahomaru gets to his feet fast enough to block the next hit, but the shock wave sends him completely through the wall behind him. One of Hyakkimaru's swords gets stuck in the wooden supporting structure of the missing wall, and he gasps in frustration or maybe even fear for a few seconds as he attempts to free it. 

"You aren't used to the reach from your arms," Tahomaru mutters. "Must be inconvenient."

Tahomaru almost lands a disemboweling cut but Hyakkimaru dodges, freeing his sword in the process. They attack one another at the same time with equal strength and jump back to different corners of the room.

When Tahomaru knocked out the wall behind him, he also upended one of the lamps filled with oil near his mother's altar. The oil spills all over the floor of the palace and ignites.

"Hyakkimaru. You'll die in the same place you were born."

"Return them!" Hyakkimaru says harshly. "They're--they're the last ones--"

Their swords cross again, close, and Tahomaru realizes he's aiming for his head again. He'd fought better at Banmon, even without hands. Hyakkimaru chased him from room to room of the burning palace, all blind anger, and the only difficulty in the fight from Tahomaru's perspective is that it's hard to get a strike in when Hyakkimaru's weapons block over half his body even when he's furiously attacking. He'll need to cripple his legs to make any headway.

Hyakkimaru must be tracking the direction of his intended strike, because he shifts his balance mid-swing and cuts into the flesh of Tahomaru's sword arm. Tahomaru gasps and tries to gouge his face with a recoiling motion of his own blade, but Hyakkimaru is too fast; all he manages to do is graze his cheekbone.

They jump over burning debris into a relatively clear space near the edge of the palace where fresh air can circulate in, always fighting, never pausing. Tahomaru pushes Hyakkimaru back toward the fire. They come to an impasse, with Hyakkimaru standing on one side of the flames and Tahomaru on the other, and Tahomaru considers this fitting. Poetic. Hyakkimaru can die in the ruined palace. He'll build another for his family. He'll get a fresh start.

He prepares to lunge at Hyakkimaru through the flames, and Hyakkimaru screams like he's dying. And he will be, very soon. The faces of Hyogo and Mutsu flash before his eyes--as children, as his friends, as corpses--and he matches Hyakkimaru's scream and _cuts_ , slashing hard enough to slice open part of Hyakkimaru's chest. He's going to cut his heart out.

"How dare you come here," Tahomaru gasps. "How dare you defile this place with your presence. This is Daigo's castle! You should never have been here!"

"Daigo's castle?" Hyakkimaru asks, sounding a bit confused. "Then it's mine!"

Bad enough that Hyakkimaru had taken Kaga's peace and the lives of Tahomaru's friends; bad enough that he'd left a trail of death and destruction through his land for his own selfish reasons. Hyakkimaru wasn't simply selfish: he was greedy. And evil.

"This is not yours!" Tahomaru says in a threatening tone while strengthening his guard. "It never was. It never will be."

Hyakkimaru attacks again, light and fast, but the moves are shallow and testing, like he's considering a new strategy. Tahoumaru pushes him out of the room onto the balcony and the connected hallway that leads to his room, which is one of the only parts of the castle that isn't on fire. 

"This is _my_ castle," Tahomaru says. "I was born and raised here. We're standing in my room. Father gave me that desk. Horses and weapons too. And mother...she always..." He gets a flash memory of his mother sitting before her altar, grieving, as she had every single day of his childhood. He shakes his head. 

Hyakkimaru hesitates a little. "Mother?"

"She is _my_ mother! You were never here!" 

"You...why?" Hyakkimaru asks, holding the edge of Tahomaru's blade contained within both of his. 

"Why what?"

"You were always here."

"Yeah. Unlike you."

"Then what was stolen from you?"

"Huh?"

"You're missing pieces. Just like me."

"N-no. That's not--"

"If you were always here, why are you missing something?"

"Shut up! If I'm missing anything it's because _you_ took it from me! Mutsu...Hyogo...mother..."

"Me? I took that from you?"

"Pay me back," Tahomaru snarls. "Give me all of you. For the sake of this land! You owe me that much!"

This is the moment: he feels it. The next strike will decide everything. 

Hyakkimaru's blade breaks through his guard and aims for his neck, but at the last second he shifts his strike higher, above Tahomaru's head. Hyakkimaru pulls his sword back and takes a defensive stance.

"Why?" Tahomaru gasps. "Why didn't you slice through me?"

"I don't know," he says, shifting his feet. "You're the same as me. You're human--not a demon."

Tahomaru sighs. "Then I lose. I've always lost to you." He looks up at Hyakkimaru. 

_Tahomaru_ , the demons whisper in his mind. _Remember our deal._

Deep within himself, Tahomaru feels a sense of impending dread. Pain overwhelms his mind as the demons attempt to override his will. "This is my chance to fulfill the demon's contract," he says. He fights the influence of the demons: he can't create a normal life for himself or his parents anymore; he never had such a thing to start with. "I'll... I'll give these back to you."

He grips his stolen eyes in his fingers and rips them out.

The demons within him howl as they leave his body; the earth shakes beneath Tahomaru's feet. He can't see; there's blood in his only good eye; but he can hear the earthquake split the wood of the palace floor asunder. He jumps back to avoid falling, then collapses flat on his face.

When he comes to, Hyakkimaru is gone. The air is thick with smoke and everything's on fire. He can't move. His head is pillowed on something soft; he hears his mother asking for his forgiveness and figures this must be a dream.

His mother promises to never leave him again. The palace roof collapses above them. His clothes are on fire.

So this is how he dies.

***

Tahoumaru wakes up with a blinding headache and only one eye. His skin is conspicuously not burned, though he's fairly certain it should be. He opens his eye and looks around.

This is his room in the palace. It's intact. It hadn't burned down. He isn't dead.

Huh?

Maybe...maybe he wasn't supposed to die? Maybe he was supposed to do as the demons said and live? Had they given him a second chance, somehow?

But no; that seemed impossible. The demons weren't even with him right now. He'd been sent back before the deal Mutsu had made.

Did that mean Mutsu wasn't supposed to make that deal?

He was so confused.

 _All right_ , he encouraged himself. _Don't give up._ **Understand** _it._ The most logical explanation seemed to be that he'd had a dream. Maybe he'd experienced a really vivid and intense dream about what was supposed to happen today. Yeah, that's it. He's been so worried since he learned about the demons that his mind made up a narrative to help him make sense of it all. Why he would think up the worst-case scenario is beyond him, but dreams don't always make sense.

He goes to visit Mutsu on her sickbed and tries to encourage her to eat. Her despair is the exact same as it was in his dream, which makes him consider the possibility that what he'd seen was a premonition of his own death--and Mutsu and Hyogo's.

In that case, shouldn't he use this chance to make sure they all survive? It would be easy, in theory. All he has to do is save Mutsu and Hyogo from being killed by that demonic horse and put out all the fires in the palace so that it doesn't burn down during his and Hyakkimaru's fight. That way, everyone will live--right?

His father would be mad at him, but his mother might be proud of him. More importantly, Mutsu and Hyogo would still be alive. Someone or something had given him a chance to save them, and he wasn't about to waste it.

Tahomaru goes through the motions of his day feeling like he's done all this before. His dream/premonition was too vivid, he decided. He tried to recall what he'd eaten the previous night. 

He doesn't deviate in the slightest from what he did in his dream until he, Mutsu and Hyogo receive Hyakkimaru's body parts. This is the most hazardous part of his plan; he knows how he can save his own life, but Mutsu and Hyogo are still in danger. Hyakkimaru is a formidable opponent on his own, even without the demon horse.

When Hyakkimaru perceives his arms and eyes through his warped demonic sight, he is incensed. "Those are mine!" Hyakkimaru screams, and Tahoumaru can clearly see his aura, more demonic than human--though it had seemed very human only seconds before.

He steels his resolve. He'd been given a vision or sent back in time for a reason--and he thinks it's because the universe wants him to make things right.

"Return them," Hyakkimaru insists as Tahoumaru deflects his sword in a wide arc and retreats a little, reining in his horse. Midoro, the demon-possessed horse, gives him a furious glare, but her aura is different from Hyakkimaru's. Brighter...and somehow dangerous.

He hadn't really paid much attention to her the first time around, but she's already killed Mutsu and Hyougo once. He's not about to let her do it again.

"They're not yours," Hyougo shouts to Hyakkimaru, and Tahoumaru snaps himself into focus. He can't afford to lose here--not again, not like this.

"You're the one who should return what's ours!" Mutsu insists, and one her strikes takes him off the horse and onto the ground. 

Hyakkimaru looks genuinely confused. Tahoumaru supposes he would be, too, if he were in the same spot. It's not like he gave himself up willingly. Still, he should understand that some sacrifices are worth making. For the good of the many.

Hyakkimaru leaps almost impossibly high to try to slash his back open, but Tahoumaru had blocked that the first time and has no trouble blocking it now. Hyakkimaru uses the force of the block to propel him, feet-first, onto Midoro's back. His aura changes suddenly, growing brighter, just like the horse's, and Tahoumaru realizes that he can draw power from other demons.

Just...what kind of a monster is Hyakkimaru, anyway?

Last time, he had told Hyakkimaru in plain terms that his arms, legs, eyes, heart, everything--everything was Daigo's, to dispose of as he saw fit. He doesn't say that now, though he'd believed it at the time. 

He also has the advantage of foresight. Instead of pressing his attack on Hyakkimaru, as he had last time, he chooses to support Hyougo and Mutsu against the horse. They had damaged it effectively from what he remembers; it's just that they'd stopped attacking before it was truly dead.

Now he's not so sure. If Hyakkimaru was human when he was born, then he belongs to the demons now, not Daigo--and has for a long time. His eyes flick to Hyougo and Mutsu's borrowed arms, and there's the red aura of demon magic that he expects to see. His free hand drifts up to his own eyes.

 _Father,_ he thinks, _I hope you know what you're doing._

He wonders if Daigo had foreseen the consequences of selling a human body to monsters. Too late now in any case. This is Tahoumaru's problem to solve now.

Frustrated--no, angry past endurance--Hyakkimaru appears in front of him in a blur of speed, standing over the collapsed horse and forcing Tahoumaru backwards with such ferocity that Tahoumaru feels like he's about to fall. 

He does fall, and as he's rolling to catch his balance, he feels Hyakkimaru's sword go into his back.

No. 

No.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way.

***

When he wakes up in his own bed with a blinding headache and his spine on fire, he knows that he's not just seeing things. Someone's sending him back.

But why? 


End file.
